


Rain

by murakistags



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Childhood Memories, Established Relationship, Hannigram - Freeform, Headcanon, Hella domestic too, Kinda feelsy???, Kinda fluffy???, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Rain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 06:41:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10691817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murakistags/pseuds/murakistags
Summary: Will loves the rain. Hannibal is a constant, a dangerous and comforting chaos just like it. Will realizes he loves Hannibal.-Just a short character study of (soft) Will Graham + weather headcanon.





	Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MaddyHughes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaddyHughes/gifts).



> This is for MaddyHughes. They're a really awesome person. They've been on the receiving end of my crazy Twitter-based Will writings for a long while now. So here's something hopefully more full and coherent. Just remember that life ebbs and flows around us, just like the rain. Bad days, happy days, and every other emotion on the spectrum. The worst days will always pass over like storms. You'll always make it through. What's left in the wake of it is wholly by your own design. And I know you have a very beautiful mind.
> 
> I really hadn't planned on publishing this. I do this thing where in the notes app on my phone, I start typing up headcanon things whenever inspiration strikes. Half of the ramblings sit there unfinished or just a right mess of words that I have nooooo patience to edit. But this one turned out pretty decent. (Maybe???) And what better inspiration to fix it up and publish it here, than to hopefully spread some love and smiles, right? Right.
> 
> Enjoy. This isn't beta'd and is probably still a mess even though I looked it over. Sorry for typos, etc.
> 
> Bon appétit.

Will loves the rain. On the darker days, he sits out on their little terracotta porch and shields himself beneath the rooftop. He listens to the patters on concrete, the soothing rhythm of raindrops striking the zinc tool shed beyond, and he's reminded of the boatyards in Biloxi. Back in the tiny house he and Pops had there, sat a sunroom with a similar zinc-lined roof. The space was drafty and cramped and only just enough room for a lanky, young Will and a spotted Golden Retriever more than half his size and named Oliver. Fresh petrichor seeped in through the old, greening wood floor, chilly winds forcing him to wrap both himself and dog in a ratty old grey linen from the back hall closet.   
  
Pops never complained or even took the time to comment– he must've figured the least he could do is give Will that little space all his own. Will never complained about sharing a room with his old man, but Pops knew the words were swallowed down for the sake of poor necessity. They didn't have much, but they lived decently off.   
  
For the short twelve months they owned that shack of a place, the sunroom was Will's absolute favorite. Those three shuddering walls and thick tempered glass, the cold floor and grimy corners, they experienced so much of Will Graham. The long afternoons of writing and reading for school. The whoops and hollers of scoring best in class on an maths exam. The hot, shameful tears of when he'd been shoved by Cole, the local pudgy eighth-grade jerk, and skinned his pale knee on the pavement. The howling cries of anxiety in the darkening autumn evenings, when Pops was out late at the waterfront and the crippling emotions of the day came crashing down.   
  
The rain is associated with so very much for Will Graham. It was chilly and drizzling the morning he first met Hannibal Lecter. “We have a new consult for the case. Be on time,” Jack had gruffly warned over the phone. Along with something of “Play nice,” as an equally-gruff afterthought. Honestly fucking condescending, in retrospect. So was Hannibal, though, in all fairness.   
  
_ I imagine what you see and learn touches everything else in your mind. _ It does, and it always did. All those beautiful and sad memories, and now these new ones. When he'd angrily flitted out of Crawford's office that day, Will didn't go right to lecture. He didn't even go back to his stifling wood-paneled office. He'd marched himself straight outside the front doors of the building. He'd have to go through security line clearance and the stupid metal detector to re-enter again, but Will didn't care. He needed a few drops of that cooling rain on his face, to drink it in like a salvation. Washing away the rage in his body, the sudden fear of being understood by this absolute stranger. Maybe adding to the agitation of that moment was that Will knew, deep down, he would begin to associate Hannibal with the rain, too.   
  
The years to follow proved as much. The mere days to follow, even. It rained terribly hard through the entire next day, and the entire next night. By the time he and Hannibal ate breakfast and then ventured out for the morning, little stray pools of stagnant rainwater sat about like collected memories. What a beautiful contentment just hours before he kicked down a door, put ten bullets in a man, and orphaned a bleeding young woman. What an adventure that day, just Hannibal's and his.   
  
Months in prison later felt as if he were dropped into the mouth of a hurtling hurricane. Dead, glazed eyes, clawing fingers, and black antlers spun about in the air current. Will had little time to think about what he would miss while in a dungeon, window-less prison cell. Like a simple blade of grass striving to last into the cold of winter, Will began to shrivel without the rain. In his mind, thunder crackling of Hannibal's voice and hands, a tube and the sharp twang of sedative, needle pricks and metronomes, and waking. Waking, in the eye of the storm. He was remembering it all, old memories refreshed by the sky's tears only present in his mind's eye.   
  
Oh, the rains. The rains on the day knife slipped into his belly and into the neck of his precious girl. The storm rolled in sudden and heavy, as if the universe knew what would happen in those twenty-four hours would never, ever escape the bone arena of his skull. The forts were fractured like the spill of glass panes and blood and body, a sight as horrific as when he'd run up those porch stairs. Heart hammering like thunderclaps, Will stepped forward and watched the sad brightness in Abigail's eyes, and subsequently watched it fade to glassy death. The tears in Hannibal's eyes flowed just a trickle, like that drizzle when they'd met. Was that a goodbye? An understanding and a love, come full circle and burst with betrayal. A teacup, shattered, swift as lightning brought down by gravity. The entire world quivered for Will Graham, rewritten in blood upon those sodden, inky pages.   
  
Everything blurred. Like that once in tenth grade when water slithered into his backpack in the rabid run home without umbrella. It stained and smudged all of his A+ handwritten paper on _Lord of the Flies_. The words still legible if one squints, but the red marking of achievement smeared beyond recognition. He should've taken it then as religious allegory, and stopped placing his faith in the rain.    
  
On the day decades later when Will sought after shadow and scaled the iron fence on the perimeter of Lecter Estate, he was also wondering of faith. The rainfall left the grounds slippery, old gravestones darkened and small, raggedy brush basking in the new bits of liquid life. How Will didn't slip and impale himself on the fence or on the end of Chiyoh's rifle, is far beyond his understanding. That shaken faith, he mused, must've come in handy after all. The rain is both his sanctuary and his prison. It's that craving for a belief in something one cannot yet fully understand, that drives one to the brink of madness. But Will Graham got there all by himself. He enjoys the company.   
  
Now, Hannibal comes stepping out onto the porch beside him. The scent of earthy rain is suddenly mixed with a warm, musky spice of bath soap and cologne, and Will finds that it isn't unfamiliar. He's known this rain to be the same all along, still pattering experiences into his little uneven mind. Hannibal is a constant, a dangerous and comforting chaos just like it. Will realizes he loves Hannibal.   
  
“Your eyes are focused miles away today, Will.” Hannibal whispers that and nothing more, curling ankles under his thighs and sitting upon the leaf-littered porch floor even though he's just showered. The lean curve of his clothed bicep presses to Will's shoulder, the same shoulder Hannibal himself had sutured neatly in their recovery post-Dragon, post-fall.   
  
“It rained when we first met,” Will says many moments later, the husky nature of his voice drowned into the roar of intensifying rain. Stormy blue-green eyes stare out across at wildflowers that bend against the watery onslaught, looking pale and sickly in dull afternoon light.   
  
Hannibal's brows furrow and he looks to Will. The pristine room in his Memory Palace broadcasts cloudy skies and drizzles in the window on that day, but not genuine rain. “Did it?”   
  
“Mmhm.” Will inhales deeply, lolls his head over to rest on Hannibal's shoulder. “Very early that morning.”   
  
Hannibal wishes to ask a thousand questions, his decades-old hunger for meat of the mind willing him to press into Will's head again. Instead, into soft brown curls that smell vaguely of pine, Hannibal presses a slow kiss. Respectful. He too rests his head upon Will, looks out at the sheets of rain in silence. Where Will watches purple petals and stems bend and fall into dirt, Hannibal sees a beautiful bloom of spring.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I think I'll work on another weather headcanon thing at some point. Because I totally believe that Hannibal has a strong, strong dislike of winter.
> 
> If you liked it, don't forget to leave kudos and comments. They inspire me and make me smile.
> 
> Also please consider [buying me a coffee for a fic](https://ko-fi.com/murakistags)!


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